In many different environments, content providers want to distribute content to selected recipients. For example, merchants want to provide advertisements and promotional offers to customers that may be interested in their products or services. One such avenue for providing advertisements that is becoming increasingly popular is via mobile applications. For example, an online video game application may present advertisements to a user that is playing the video game using a mobile electronic device, such as a smartphone or tablet computer. The advertisement may be displayed somewhere along the perimeter of the display screen such that the advertisement does not interfere with the game itself.
In some instances, a content provider may rely on contextual information when making decisions regarding selections of advertisements to provide to a recipient. For example, advertisers often use a search query or content presented on a web page to select advertisements to present to a user. However, selecting advertisements for display by a mobile application can be problematic due to the lack of contextual information available as compared to search query or content based advertisement. Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved mechanism for selecting advertisement and other content for delivery to mobile applications.